“Nothing I could see. Nothing wrong with any of it—her. Pretty, built nice, smooth hair and all. Just the face. Well, look at it.”
“What do you mean about her face, Jelly?”
“Empty,” he said after staring and thinking about it for a moment. “It looks just empty, that’s all.”
Some distance east of Opal Hill was a hidden cavern of the Hippae, one of many which could have been found on Grass if anyone had dared to look. Set deep into the hillside, its narrow openings shaded by great swaths of vermilion grasses which fell across the slender doors in gently moving curtains, the cavern was undergoing a periodic refurbishing. Arriving and departing at the northernmost slit were the creatures responsible, molelike migerers, diggers par excellence, scuttling now through the vermilion and the fuschia, out into the shorter, violet-colored grasses, their furry thigh-pockets full of loose earth recently scraped from the floor of the Hippae hall.
Inside that hall a shadowed emptiness was supported by pillars of rubbly stone, stones uncovered when the caverns were dug, each stone mortared into place with the adhesive which resulted from mixing migerer shit and earth. Marvelous creatures, the migerers—builders, almost engineers, certainly cave makers of no small talent who made similar, though smaller, caverns for themselves, each cavern linked to others by miles of winding tunnels.
In this great hall they blinked their squinty eyes, deep-pocketed in indigo fur, and chirped to one another in flute tones as they plodded across the cavern, scraping the high places into the low with urgent flat-edged claws, stamping the loose dirt down with the hard pads on their industrious hind feet.
A Hippae came into the cavern, striding on great tripartite hooves across the smoothed floor, quartering the cave again and again, nodding approval with his monstrous head, the teeth showing slightly where the lips drew back in a half snarl, the razorlike neck barbs making a dissonant clash as the beast tossed its head and bellowed at the ceiling.
The migerers affected not to notice, perhaps really did not notice. Nothing changed in their behavior. They still darted about under the very hooves of the prancing monster, scraping, packing, filling their furry pockets, and darting away into the grasses to dispose of this evidence of industry. Only when they were finished, when the floor was as smooth as their instinctive skills could make it, did they desist and fall to grooming round bellies and small tough feet, combing whiskers with curved ivory claws, blinking in the half light of the entrance slits. Then a whistle, a plaint on the wind as from some bird calling in mild distress, and they were gone, away, vanished in the grasses as though they had never been. In the cavern behind them the Hippae continued its slow parade, bellowing now and again to make the cavern ring, alone in majesty surveying and approving the work which had been done.
A second monster called in response, entering the cavern to begin a quartering of its own. Then came a third and fourth, then many, prancing in intricate patterns upon the cavern floor, interweaving and paralleling, twos and fours and sixes becoming twelves and eighteens, the files of them turning and braiding in complicated design, hooves falling as precisely as artisans’ hammers into the tracks themselves had made.
Not far off, in Opal Hill village, Dulia Mechanic turned restlessly on her bed, half wakened by the subterranean thunder. “What, what’s that?” she murmured, still mostly asleep.
“The Hippae are dancing,” said her young husband Sebastian Mechanic, wide awake, for he had been listening to the rhythmic surge for an hour or more while she had breathed quietly beside him. “Dancing,” he reasserted, not sure whether he believed it or not. Besides, he had something else on his mind.
“How do you know? Everyone says that, but how do you know?” she whined, still not awake.
“Someone saw them, I suppose,” he said, wondering for the first time how that particular someone had seen what he claimed he had seen. Sebastian himself would rather face certain death than sneak around in the tall grasses, spying on Hippae. Without identifying the source, he murmured, “Someone, a long time ago,” and went back to thinking what he had been thinking of for a long time now, about those at Opal Hill.
Out in the night, in the cavern where all the thunder came from, the Hippae moved their anfractuous quadrille along to its culmination.
Suddenly, without any sense of climax, it was over. The Hippae left the cavern as they had entered it, by ones and twos, leaving a pattern intricate and detailed as a tapestry trampled deep into the floor behind them. To them who made it, it had meaning, a meaning otherwise expressible only by a long sequence of twitches of hide and particular blinks of eye. The ancient Hippae language of gesture and quiver and almost undetectable movement was useless for this particular purpose, but the Hippae know another language as well. In the other language, learned long ago from another race, this design stamped deep into their cavern floor was their way of writing—and thereby giving notice of—a certain inexorable word.
In the stables at Opal Hill, the horses were awake, listening as they had listened many nights, most nights, since they had come to Grass. Millefiori whickered to the stallion, Don Quixote, and he in turn to Irish Lass next to him, the whispering rattle running down the length of the stalls and then back again, like a roll-taking. “Here,” each seemed to say.
